The Mathematica Story: A Scrapbook

Comments & Stories

My first use of Mathematica was in the last months of 1988 when I was asked by my aerospace industry management to evaluate various mathematics software programs that could be used to help the company engineers increase their development productivity. After my evaluations were complete my view was that Mathematica (then in its very first release) was in a class of its own. It had no close competitors in terms of the huge breadth of capability the core unadorned Mathematica software package provided. More…

Robert Meyer

Mathematica user since 1988

Ten years before the end of the last millennium (~1990 depending on whether indexing begins at 0 or 1) a friend of mine who was a Professor of Mathematics showed me his revolutionary NeXT computer—and the star of it was Mathematica. The immediate impact was its versatility and the ability to easily visualize computational results with the variety of plots. More…

Stephen Shaler

Professor of Wood Science, University of Maine

My PhD supervisor, Klaus Schulten, showed me Mathematica on his Macintosh computer back in 1989 and it was unbelievable! I had had no idea that something like this existed. A real WOW moment! More…

Helmut Heller

Physicist, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Germany

I bought a NeXT computer primarily to get Mathematica. When I started to play with it, I was immediately captivated. It could do so many things! After learning the basics, I proceeded to develop a set of notebooks that illustrated the concepts in my textbook, Microeconomic Analysis. These were released in 1992 and are still available on the Wolfram website.

I went on to edit two books about how to use Mathematica for economic analysis.

At the beginning I was mostly using Mathematica to illustrate concepts in economic theory, but over the years I shifted to using it for statistics, data analysis, and visualization. I feel that Mathematica has contributed greatly to my work.

Hal Varian

Chief Economist, Google

My first introduction to Mathematica was with Version 2.0 back in the early ’90s as an undergrad in physics at the University of Washington in Seattle. I had occasion to use it from time to time to double-check my math and physics work. Then in my senior year I did an amazing one-on-one project class with one of the department’s more elder mathematical physicists. In the class I did various projects and simulations using Mathematica. As the term went on I began to suspect that I was not so much there to learn from the professor, but to teach him how to use this relatively new amazing application. More…